boutons
12-04-2005, 12:09 AM
Having totally fucked up and lied about every other "reason" for the Repub war, "freedom and democracy to Iraq" was/is such a long shot, against all odds, 100s of ducks to line up and keep in line for years. It's clear the long shot was made in complete ignorance of ME and Iraqi history.
==========================
washingtonpost.com
New Attacks Threaten Political Truce in Iraq
Wave of Sectarian Killings Mars Run-Up to Vote
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 4, 2005; A21
BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 -- A recent wave of killings and assassinations in Iraq threatens a tenuous political truce between Arab Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, the head of the country's most influential group of Sunni clerics said Saturday, 12 days before national parliamentary elections.
Abdul Salam Kubaisi, a senior official of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, said the group would "reconsider the decisions" it reached with rival Shiites and Kurds at a national reconciliation conference last month in Cairo. The leaders had agreed that violence in Iraq should stop, U.S. forces should gradually withdraw and some detainees should be freed.
The agreement was hailed by the United States and other governments as an important step toward preventing the country from splitting into warring factions. But Kubaisi said the pledge to curb the violence had not been kept. He blamed the Shiite-led government's security forces and U.S. troops for the continuing attacks.
"What is happening on the ground differs completely from what was promised," he said at a news conference.
The Sunnis and Shiites have accused armed groups belonging to each other's sects of carrying out assassinations, bombings and abductions in advance of the Dec. 15 elections.
The violence continued Saturday as 17 Iraqi soldiers were killed in an ambush near Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. A bomb exploded near the army patrol, and gunmen then opened fire, according to Ali Khayam, an Iraqi army spokesman.
An Iraqi policeman was killed in Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, during an hour-long gunfight. Another officer was killed in the northern city of Kirkuk.
U.S. military authorities also announced Saturday that three American soldiers had been killed in a vehicle accident in Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and that a U.S. Marine had died of wounds from a rocket attack Thursday in Ramadi. U.S. forces have suffered 22 fatalities in the past five days.
Kidnappings have also resumed after a lull. In Baghdad, U.S. forces carrying out a routine car search found two civilians bound and gagged in the trunk of the vehicle Thursday, a military spokesman said Saturday. Two men in the car carrying fake Iraqi police badges were arrested, the spokesman said.
Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television satellite network, broadcast a second video showing four Western peace activists, including Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., who were abducted a week ago. Al-Jazeera did not broadcast the audio from the tape but said it included a threat to kill the four hostages if all detainees in U.S. and Iraqi prisons were not released by Thursday. The network broadcast a previous video of the captives Tuesday.
Violence in Iraq is threatening to tear the country into pieces controlled by sectarian rivals, heightening the risk of a civil war that could draw in neighboring countries. Many suspect that Sunni Arabs, who dominated the government until Saddam Hussein was overthrown as president, are encouraging the insurgency.
The head of the largest Shiite political party reiterated that prospect Saturday in a warning to Sunni Arab rivals. "We will not allow the Saddamists and Baathists to return to the government and its institutions," said Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He added that the party would "work to form regions," a formula likely to give the majority Shiites an oil-rich base in southern Iraq.
The country's most revered Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, on Saturday urged his followers to participate in the elections, though he did not endorse any political party.
Some Sunnis say the government's security apparatus, including the army and police, has been infiltrated by Shiite militias that are carrying out attacks in league with the United States.
Kubaisi said the Association of Muslim Scholars might stop cooperating on political matters because of the "continuing breaches of human rights violations by the Iraqi forces and American occupation forces." He brandished pictures of a dead man and his 1-year-old son who, he said, were killed by Iraqi forces, as well as pictures of three farmers he said were killed by U.S. forces west of Baghdad. These were "crimes against humanity committed by the Americans against helpless civilians," he said.
Kubaisi's talk of withdrawal "is a powerful threat," said Khalaf Elayan, head of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni political party aligned with the association. "If they decide to withdraw from the political process, we will withdraw as well. We are all gathered under one umbrella."
If the Sunni Arab parties boycott the elections as they did the January election for the current government, "those who were marginalized before will be marginalized again," he said.
Naseer Ani, head of one of the largest Sunni political parties in the bloc, said a decision had not been made on whether to participate in the elections. But he said the parties were unhappy that the Cairo conference had produced few results.
"The Cairo conference agreed to stop the violations and raids against Sunnis," he said. "But that didn't happen."
Fresh evidence of the tactics used by both sides was provided in the form of a compact disc that was given to a reporter in Tikrit by a Sunni mosque official. The disc shows a masked man speaking for the Mujaheddin Army, a Sunni-led insurgency group, and two women, identified as Najal and Suad.
The two women, who worked with Iraqi and U.S. forces, are shown nervously "confessing" to having been used sexually. They are blindfolded, and then they are shot. The bodies were found Nov. 21 in the desert near a U.S. base.
A spokesman for U.S forces said the military has not seen the CD and had no comment.
Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad, Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and Hassan Shammari in Adhaim contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
=======================================
December 3, 2005
Globalist
This Officer's Big Worry Isn't About Force Levels
By ROGER COHEN
<http://www.iht.com>International Herald Tribune
"When you set up a very capable army and police force with a weak and inefficient government, you set the stage for a military takeover. That is not what we went to Ieaq to help them establish."
The words are those of a senior U.S. military officer who is between assignments to Iraq. His frustration with the enduring corruption and ineptitude of Iraqi ministries is indicative of the tense backdrop to President George W. Bush's outline Wednesday of a national strategy for victory in Iraq.
The U.S. military is stretched. Many officers, like this one, are returning to Iraq for second tours not long after completing a first. They have put tremendous efforts into the training and deployment of nearly 120 Iraqi Army and police battalions. Although the quality of these battalions is often patchy, progress has been made.
But such headway on what Bush calls "the security track" is meaningless in a vacuum. The president portrayed an integrated push on the political, economic and military fronts leading to "complete victory" at an unspecified date, but there's growing skepticism in the armed forces that their efforts are being matched on the civilian side.
"If we leave Iraq now it would be a total disaster, but the military has done about as much as we can do," the officer said. "We have to work the other lines of operation, and the politics have to develop at the same pace. As things stand, it's upsetting our officers, and that worries me."
Referring to the U.S. agency coordinating rebuilding efforts, he added: "The Iraqi Reconstruction and Management Office has to get people over to the ministries to help with the interagency process. Until we can provide the Iraqis with a basic level of services, with basic necessities, we're not going to broaden support."
The problem, of course, is that a Westerner trying to go over to an Iraqi ministry in Baghdad might end up seriously dead. Most of the U.S. reconstruction team (officials and contractors and others) is holed up in the Green Zone, the walled city within a city where the Americans reinventing Iraq live and work.
Often Western contractors are forced to rely on photographs brought to them by Iraqi employees when they want to assess progress on projects like schools or electrical facilities. In these circumstances, even with $18.4 billion in U.S. taxpayers' money allocated for Iraqi rebuilding, it's not easy to get a Ministry of Health that's responsive up and running, or an Oil Ministry that's efficient, or an electricity system reliable enough to support economic expansion.
"This is not just a shooting war," the officer, who did not want to be identified on the eve of a sensitive new assignment to Iraq, said. "If you can't give people the sense that their government is capable of governing them, if you can't create a professional bureaucracy, the insurgency becomes a perpetual-motion machine."
He has seen evidence that support for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the main terrorist threat to American forces, has begun to grow again on the basis of domestic recruitment.
"Zarqawi was about 90 percent foreign fighters, but his support seems to be moving in the other direction, with more coming to him internally than he has to import," the officer said. "That's one measure of dissatisfaction with the government."
The Bush administration is hoping that Dec. 15 elections for a government that will serve for four years will help bring clarity and greater inclusiveness to the political process. What Iraq has lacked as much as anything is any political figure with remotely the inclusive appeal of <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/hamid_karzai/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.
Some U.S. officials see Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite campaigning in a centrist alliance including some leading Sunnis, as the best hope, but his chances against the Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni parties remain uncertain. "I want anything that will make Sunnis more part of the political process," the officer said.
The election will usher in a critical year for Iraq during which the political pressures stemming from midterm congressional elections in the United States will complicate prosecution of a war that is increasingly unpopular.
It is now clear that when Representative John Murtha, a senior House Democrat, declared last month that U.S. troops in Iraq should "immediately redeploy," he was reflecting not only frustration in the country but growing frustration in a military with which the politician, a former marine, has close ties.
The officer made clear that although there might be "an opportunity to roll down the numbers in a gradual way," he saw no possibility of a rapid withdrawal or redeployment.
Bush seems adamant that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq in substantial numbers for an extended period. "I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," he said. The president is a stubborn man. But American attention spans can be fickle and political pressures for sharp cuts in troop levels are certain to grow.
It remains unclear whether the generational commitment that is no doubt necessary to stabilize Iraq in a lasting way exists. The U.S. military has made such commitments in places like South Korea, but in other parts of the world, not least Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Cold War, America has ignited upheaval only to slip away to its subsequent cost.
The officer, whose commitment to Iraq is passionate, said: "If we can show the rest of the Middle East that this democracy thing, in whatever form it takes in Iraq, offers a better opportunity for them in the future, that to me is victory. Short of that is failure, and to replace Saddam with another dictator would be absolute failure."
E-mail: rocohen@<http://nytimes.com>nytimes.com
==========================
washingtonpost.com
New Attacks Threaten Political Truce in Iraq
Wave of Sectarian Killings Mars Run-Up to Vote
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 4, 2005; A21
BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 -- A recent wave of killings and assassinations in Iraq threatens a tenuous political truce between Arab Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, the head of the country's most influential group of Sunni clerics said Saturday, 12 days before national parliamentary elections.
Abdul Salam Kubaisi, a senior official of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, said the group would "reconsider the decisions" it reached with rival Shiites and Kurds at a national reconciliation conference last month in Cairo. The leaders had agreed that violence in Iraq should stop, U.S. forces should gradually withdraw and some detainees should be freed.
The agreement was hailed by the United States and other governments as an important step toward preventing the country from splitting into warring factions. But Kubaisi said the pledge to curb the violence had not been kept. He blamed the Shiite-led government's security forces and U.S. troops for the continuing attacks.
"What is happening on the ground differs completely from what was promised," he said at a news conference.
The Sunnis and Shiites have accused armed groups belonging to each other's sects of carrying out assassinations, bombings and abductions in advance of the Dec. 15 elections.
The violence continued Saturday as 17 Iraqi soldiers were killed in an ambush near Baqubah, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. A bomb exploded near the army patrol, and gunmen then opened fire, according to Ali Khayam, an Iraqi army spokesman.
An Iraqi policeman was killed in Samarra, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, during an hour-long gunfight. Another officer was killed in the northern city of Kirkuk.
U.S. military authorities also announced Saturday that three American soldiers had been killed in a vehicle accident in Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, and that a U.S. Marine had died of wounds from a rocket attack Thursday in Ramadi. U.S. forces have suffered 22 fatalities in the past five days.
Kidnappings have also resumed after a lull. In Baghdad, U.S. forces carrying out a routine car search found two civilians bound and gagged in the trunk of the vehicle Thursday, a military spokesman said Saturday. Two men in the car carrying fake Iraqi police badges were arrested, the spokesman said.
Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television satellite network, broadcast a second video showing four Western peace activists, including Tom Fox, 54, of Clear Brook, Va., who were abducted a week ago. Al-Jazeera did not broadcast the audio from the tape but said it included a threat to kill the four hostages if all detainees in U.S. and Iraqi prisons were not released by Thursday. The network broadcast a previous video of the captives Tuesday.
Violence in Iraq is threatening to tear the country into pieces controlled by sectarian rivals, heightening the risk of a civil war that could draw in neighboring countries. Many suspect that Sunni Arabs, who dominated the government until Saddam Hussein was overthrown as president, are encouraging the insurgency.
The head of the largest Shiite political party reiterated that prospect Saturday in a warning to Sunni Arab rivals. "We will not allow the Saddamists and Baathists to return to the government and its institutions," said Abdul Aziz Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. He added that the party would "work to form regions," a formula likely to give the majority Shiites an oil-rich base in southern Iraq.
The country's most revered Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, on Saturday urged his followers to participate in the elections, though he did not endorse any political party.
Some Sunnis say the government's security apparatus, including the army and police, has been infiltrated by Shiite militias that are carrying out attacks in league with the United States.
Kubaisi said the Association of Muslim Scholars might stop cooperating on political matters because of the "continuing breaches of human rights violations by the Iraqi forces and American occupation forces." He brandished pictures of a dead man and his 1-year-old son who, he said, were killed by Iraqi forces, as well as pictures of three farmers he said were killed by U.S. forces west of Baghdad. These were "crimes against humanity committed by the Americans against helpless civilians," he said.
Kubaisi's talk of withdrawal "is a powerful threat," said Khalaf Elayan, head of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni political party aligned with the association. "If they decide to withdraw from the political process, we will withdraw as well. We are all gathered under one umbrella."
If the Sunni Arab parties boycott the elections as they did the January election for the current government, "those who were marginalized before will be marginalized again," he said.
Naseer Ani, head of one of the largest Sunni political parties in the bloc, said a decision had not been made on whether to participate in the elections. But he said the parties were unhappy that the Cairo conference had produced few results.
"The Cairo conference agreed to stop the violations and raids against Sunnis," he said. "But that didn't happen."
Fresh evidence of the tactics used by both sides was provided in the form of a compact disc that was given to a reporter in Tikrit by a Sunni mosque official. The disc shows a masked man speaking for the Mujaheddin Army, a Sunni-led insurgency group, and two women, identified as Najal and Suad.
The two women, who worked with Iraqi and U.S. forces, are shown nervously "confessing" to having been used sexually. They are blindfolded, and then they are shot. The bodies were found Nov. 21 in the desert near a U.S. base.
A spokesman for U.S forces said the military has not seen the CD and had no comment.
Correspondent Jonathan Finer and special correspondents Omar Fekeiki in Baghdad, Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and Hassan Shammari in Adhaim contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
=======================================
December 3, 2005
Globalist
This Officer's Big Worry Isn't About Force Levels
By ROGER COHEN
<http://www.iht.com>International Herald Tribune
"When you set up a very capable army and police force with a weak and inefficient government, you set the stage for a military takeover. That is not what we went to Ieaq to help them establish."
The words are those of a senior U.S. military officer who is between assignments to Iraq. His frustration with the enduring corruption and ineptitude of Iraqi ministries is indicative of the tense backdrop to President George W. Bush's outline Wednesday of a national strategy for victory in Iraq.
The U.S. military is stretched. Many officers, like this one, are returning to Iraq for second tours not long after completing a first. They have put tremendous efforts into the training and deployment of nearly 120 Iraqi Army and police battalions. Although the quality of these battalions is often patchy, progress has been made.
But such headway on what Bush calls "the security track" is meaningless in a vacuum. The president portrayed an integrated push on the political, economic and military fronts leading to "complete victory" at an unspecified date, but there's growing skepticism in the armed forces that their efforts are being matched on the civilian side.
"If we leave Iraq now it would be a total disaster, but the military has done about as much as we can do," the officer said. "We have to work the other lines of operation, and the politics have to develop at the same pace. As things stand, it's upsetting our officers, and that worries me."
Referring to the U.S. agency coordinating rebuilding efforts, he added: "The Iraqi Reconstruction and Management Office has to get people over to the ministries to help with the interagency process. Until we can provide the Iraqis with a basic level of services, with basic necessities, we're not going to broaden support."
The problem, of course, is that a Westerner trying to go over to an Iraqi ministry in Baghdad might end up seriously dead. Most of the U.S. reconstruction team (officials and contractors and others) is holed up in the Green Zone, the walled city within a city where the Americans reinventing Iraq live and work.
Often Western contractors are forced to rely on photographs brought to them by Iraqi employees when they want to assess progress on projects like schools or electrical facilities. In these circumstances, even with $18.4 billion in U.S. taxpayers' money allocated for Iraqi rebuilding, it's not easy to get a Ministry of Health that's responsive up and running, or an Oil Ministry that's efficient, or an electricity system reliable enough to support economic expansion.
"This is not just a shooting war," the officer, who did not want to be identified on the eve of a sensitive new assignment to Iraq, said. "If you can't give people the sense that their government is capable of governing them, if you can't create a professional bureaucracy, the insurgency becomes a perpetual-motion machine."
He has seen evidence that support for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the main terrorist threat to American forces, has begun to grow again on the basis of domestic recruitment.
"Zarqawi was about 90 percent foreign fighters, but his support seems to be moving in the other direction, with more coming to him internally than he has to import," the officer said. "That's one measure of dissatisfaction with the government."
The Bush administration is hoping that Dec. 15 elections for a government that will serve for four years will help bring clarity and greater inclusiveness to the political process. What Iraq has lacked as much as anything is any political figure with remotely the inclusive appeal of <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/hamid_karzai/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president.
Some U.S. officials see Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite campaigning in a centrist alliance including some leading Sunnis, as the best hope, but his chances against the Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni parties remain uncertain. "I want anything that will make Sunnis more part of the political process," the officer said.
The election will usher in a critical year for Iraq during which the political pressures stemming from midterm congressional elections in the United States will complicate prosecution of a war that is increasingly unpopular.
It is now clear that when Representative John Murtha, a senior House Democrat, declared last month that U.S. troops in Iraq should "immediately redeploy," he was reflecting not only frustration in the country but growing frustration in a military with which the politician, a former marine, has close ties.
The officer made clear that although there might be "an opportunity to roll down the numbers in a gradual way," he saw no possibility of a rapid withdrawal or redeployment.
Bush seems adamant that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq in substantial numbers for an extended period. "I will settle for nothing less than complete victory," he said. The president is a stubborn man. But American attention spans can be fickle and political pressures for sharp cuts in troop levels are certain to grow.
It remains unclear whether the generational commitment that is no doubt necessary to stabilize Iraq in a lasting way exists. The U.S. military has made such commitments in places like South Korea, but in other parts of the world, not least Soviet-occupied Afghanistan during the Cold War, America has ignited upheaval only to slip away to its subsequent cost.
The officer, whose commitment to Iraq is passionate, said: "If we can show the rest of the Middle East that this democracy thing, in whatever form it takes in Iraq, offers a better opportunity for them in the future, that to me is victory. Short of that is failure, and to replace Saddam with another dictator would be absolute failure."
E-mail: rocohen@<http://nytimes.com>nytimes.com